Overview of The WTO

 Objective of presentation

 WTO: The Beginnings

 Growth in Trade Underway

 A New Multilateral Organization

 The WTO: what is it?

 How does the WTO function?

 Principles of the Trading System

 Provisions for developing countries

 Progressing by packages

 The Round to end all rounds

 The WTO Agreement

 Liberalising trade in goods

 Textiles - back in the mainstream

 Agriculture: fairer markets for all

 Trade remedies

 Standards and procedures

 Administrative procedures

 Services: rules for growth and investment

 Services: the key rules

 Services: Better Access to Markets

 Intellectual Property: protection and enforcement of rights

 TRIPS: what does it cover?

 Settling Disputes: the heart of the system

 Meetings of Ministers

  Singapore Ministerial

 Geneva and Seattle Ministerials

 Doha Ministerial Meeting

 Cancun Ministerial Meeting

 Recent Developments

Progressing by packages

Gradual evolution

The development of the rules based multilateral trading system has been a gradual one and the evolution has progressed through rounds of negotiations. The importance of these rounds can not be over emphasized. The most recent of the completed rounds is the Uruguay Round. The current round is the Doha Development Agenda.

Package approach

Negotiating through rounds of negotiations can be lengthy. The Uruguay Round took seven and a half years. However, negotiating agreements in the context of rounds has its advantages. They offer a package approach to trade negotiations that can sometimes be more fruitful than negotiations on a single issue.  The size of the package can mean more benefits because participants can seek and secure advantages across a wide range of issues.

Making trade-offs

In such a package, the ability to trade-off the different issues can make agreement easier to reach. Not all the outcomes of each of the issues under negotiations is necessarily of benefit - or even of interest - to every country. Nevertheless, for everyone to agree, each country must see that it is in their interest to adopt the total package.  In this manner, reform in politically-sensitive sectors of world trade - such as agricultural - can be more feasible in the context of a global package if agriculture reform is complemented by other market openings. As far as developing countries are concerned, they have a greater chance of influencing the multilateral trading system in a trade round than in bilateral negotiations with powerful trading nations.

Strengths and weaknesses

But wide ranging rounds have both strengths and weaknesses. The results of the ongoing debate on the effectiveness of multi-sector rounds versus single-sector negotiations is ambiguous. At some stages, the Uruguay Round seemed so cumbersome that reaching agreement in every subject by all participating countries appeared impossible.